We Play a Game: Volume 112 (Yale Series of Younger Poets) - Softcover

"These are intimate, mischievous poems, alternately wry, forthright, vulnerable, winking, and sincere."-Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe Winner of the 2019 Lamda Literary Awards, Bisexual Poetry category

Duy Doan's striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection's unassuming title, in poems that explore-now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve-the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan's experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for-and masterfully playing with-the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother's dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that "talks to his other self in the well"-all have a place in Doan's far-reaching and intimately human art.